Category: rants

The Things We Carry

Bag contents - I'm clearly not carrying enough crap
Sunglasses, Kindle, spoon, outdated coupons – the rather pathetic contents of my bag. I need to carry more crap.

Americans have too much stuff. And whether it’s an SUV, a bike or on foot, we like to carry all of our crap with us.

A measure of status used to be that a man wasn’t encumbered by a knapsack. That was for the working class. A gentleman carried nothing more than a billfold.

Contemporary America has reversed this – now it’s the poor who carry nothing while our elites strap all manner of bags and belts to their person to haul their electronic devices and luxury goods.

No one really needs an iPhone, iPad, Kindle and digital camera with them all the time – they are devices whose purposes overlap. Yet, many people carry all this – and much more – in messenger bags, a utilitarian tool that’s been transformed into an emblem of the creative class. Thou shall know the web designers by their Timbuk2 bags…

The digital age was supposed to free of us from physical objects. After all, everything is in the cloud – photos, videos, books, travel plans, schedules, mail. Yet, this development has lead to a profusion of devices that Americans feel compelled to schlep with them at all times.

Case in point: the San Francisco cyclist carrying around a veritable apothecary on wheels. In addition to the requisite i-devices of her generation, she has medical supplies, a beauty kit, foodstuffs, bike tools and portable radio gear. She’s better outfitted than Amazonian explorers of the last century. All of this stuff she loads onto a Dahon, a folding bike. I have a Dahon. Loading it with twenty pounds of gear defeats the purpose of this small, practical bike.

The SF cyclist is not the only pannier-stuffing bike hoarder out there. Lifehacker profiles people like her in Featured Bag, a celebration of conspicuous consumption as measured by the amount of crap you can haul on your back. There’s even a Flickr group where aficionados proudly display the objects that they carry. They share them with us for they are signifiers, indicating the schlepper’s class, profession and beliefs. A person carrying three-pounds of salad and a copy of The Alchemist is going to be considerably different than someone with an Android tablet and stun gun. Know the bag, know the person.

We’re defined by what we carry. Whether it’s an iPad or a particular brand of lip balm, every object we carry has meaning – exactly like hoarders. But hoarders at least get to leave the hoard. We put it in a backpack and take it with is.

Death is the only separation from our stuff. Does it have to be?

Vikings were buried with their household goods. Ancient Egyptians were entombed with the items that they’d need in the afterlife.

Americans should adopt this practice. Death should not part you from your beloved Altoid Smalls or Aveda sun screen. You should not have to say goodbye to your Ortlieb panniers. “Bury me with my Tumi!” should be the cry.

Objects so precious that we strap them to our back deserve to follow us into death and beyond. We are the things we carry.

 

Tour de Fat Recap: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Mohawk nation

More than 7,000 people descended upon Yards Park in Washington, DC for the third annual Tour de Fat. For those unfamiliar with this unique event, it is a celebration of bikes, beer and fun sponsored by New Belgium, the Colorado-based brewer of Fat Tire.

I’ve attended every year for it brings together two of my great loves: bikes and beer. Here’s what it was like: Continue reading “Tour de Fat Recap: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly”

Bureaucracy Kills Filmmaking in DC

U.S. Capitol at dawn
You can’t film here.

“As a result of this new policy, film and television producers will think twice before deciding to film in the District,” Palmer wrote. “Why? In a word, ‘Bureaucracy.’”

That was Crystal Palmer, head of the DC Office of Motion Picture and Television Development, on the failed effort to get House of Cards, a DC-based series, to actually film in DC.

I don’t blame Palmer. As the article indicates, filming in DC isn’t the one-stop shop it is in other states and cities. Producers have to deal with countless government agencies (state and federal), various police forces (state and federal), DC councilmembers looking for payoffs, organized interest groups and the NIMBYest of neighborhood organizations in the nation. And they have to navigate these competing bureaucratic interests on their own.

Instead, producers come to DC, shoot a couple of exteriors and establishing shots (like the great opening credit sequence in House of Cards) and then decamp to Baltimore or a California for the rest.

As a Washingtonian, this bothers me. House of Cards does not look like DC to people who live here. The city in the Netflix series looks too gritty and worn – like Baltimore. And we don’t have a Cathedral Heights Metro stop. I stopped watching 24 the season it was set in DC because it was obviously, ridiculously LA – the buildings were too tall and DC does not have a sprawling waterfront district that looks like Long Beach.

TV viewers may be surprised to learn that Washington does not have the sandy hues of a Burbank back lot. It’s greener. There’s more marble. It rains.

We’re no longer able to depict this nation’s capital on film due to the leviathan security state that has grown up over the past decade. The U.S. Park Police, Secret Service, Capitol Police and other agencies have blocked off vast swaths of the city that used to be open to the public and to filmmakers. They’d prefer a capital without people. The loss is not just to directors and producers – it’s to all of us who deserve to see Washington on film.

Every Communicator Needs a Real Photographer

Leica M9 and prosecco

This recent post by Vocus – Every Communicator Needs a Real Camera – highlights how important photography is for business. We depend on photos for blogs, web sites, brochures, tweets, Facebook posts and other kinds of marketing collateral.

Photos are a kind of shorthand, selling a product more effectively than a hundred lines of copy. They communicate who you are and what your brand stands for. Photos are essential to sharing your message with the world.

Despite this, photography is an unappreciated medium. Because free photos are widely available on sites like Flickr, and because anyone with an iPhone can take a picture, many organizations pay little money or attention to their photo needs. Yet, a compelling business case can be made for paying for photographers and photography.

A couple of examples:

1. At a company I worked for, the CEO received a major award at a trade show. We wanted to run a story on the web site about it. But the only photo we had was a blurry iPhone shot from fifty feet away. Without a good photo, we couldn’t do the story.

2. I was the photo coordinator for the DC Shorts Film Festival, responsible for managing a volunteer army of photogs who captured images of film screenings, crowded parties, red carpet arrivals and VIP events. This is an awesome event that you should attend. But don’t take my word for it – check out the photos and decide for yourself. In addition to helping attract attendees to the festival, these photos demonstrated to sponsors how their products were being enjoyed, were included in the annual report and were widely shared in social media.

The Vocus article states that communicators need a good camera. But a camera is just a tool. You need someone who knows how to use it. That person is a photographer. Look for one in your organization. Don’t make photography “other duties as assigned” but give them the time, money and equipment they need to tell your organization’s story. Invest in photography the same way you invest in web site hosting, email marketing and social media.

And if you don’t have a photographer, hire one through a group like APADC.

In this digital age, digital photographers are essential. Don’t miss the important moments in your company because no one had a decent camera. Hire a photographer to create images that you’ll use for years to come.

The 21st Century is a Really Bad Time for Control Freaks

The 21st Century is a really bad time for control freaks.
– Alec Ross, former Senior Advisor for Innovation to the U.S. Secretary of State

The State Department trusts its employees to tweet – why doesn’t yours?

The above quote was mentioned by Graham Lampa, State Department Office of Public Diplomacy, at the SocialGov Summit, a workshop on how government agencies are using social media to help build a more connected, responsive, and performance-driven government. The event featured digital experts from the State Department, USAID, Peace Corps, Red Cross and the Philippines government who discussed using social media to connect with audiences at home and abroad.

Lampa brought up the quote from his former boss when someone asked, “How are tweets cleared in your agency?” The answer is that State trusts its staff. In a rapidly changing world, there is not time to send social media through some cumbersome review process, particularly when you have staff scattered across the globe. State trusts its Ambassadors and consular staff to speak for the agency – and the country.

A friend of mine used to work for a Very Important Nonprofit (that no one has heard of outside of Washington). It believed that the world waited for their announcements as if they were Kremlin communiques. Even a simple tweet required multiple levels of sign-offs and approvals, with anxious emails parsing every single word over the course of days, sometime weeks. When the tweets finally reached the outside world, they read as if they were written by pedantic lawyers. They were ignored.

This is how you kill off social media. Who would want to tweet for an org like that?

But your employees will talk about you. They’re tweeting, posting on Facebook, pinning on Pinterest, holding Google Hangouts and taking pictures on Flickr. The conversation is taking place and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Communication can’t be controlled, even if you review every tweet employees produce during working hours.

“The 21st Century is a really bad time for control freaks,” as Alec Ross says. The State Department has 270 locations in 172 countries. It’s budget is in the tens of billions of dollars. They have guns, badges and the power of the federal government but even they can’t control what people are saying about them online. State wisely recognizes that they can’t control the conversation – instead they must contribute to it, using their best resource: their people.

Your employees want to help. They’re already talking about you on Facebook. Rather than tangling them in some social media policy, trust them to communicate your message online. After all, you hired them, didn’t you?

Get employes on your side. Get them tweeting for you. They are your best resource for they represent the authentic voice of your organization. Make them ambassadors for your brand – and get out of the way.

Friday Photo: Flickr Embed Edition

The ability to easily embed photos on a web site is one of those things you just kinda expect these days. You expect to be provided a bit of code to copy and paste into a site. Yet, until recently, Flickr didn’t provide an easy embed tool.

Not that using Flickr photos on a WordPress site was difficult before – you selected a size, copied the code, added a caption, linked to the photo and voila! It was a multi-step process, but not a difficult one.

Flickr has made this easier with Flickr Web Embeds. It’s slightly easier than the old method but I don’t entirely like it – since it’s an embed, you can’t put a caption under it. And when I created this post yesterday, the photo had a white Flickr label on it, which has since disappeared.

Hopefully, this is just the start and Flickr will offer the ability to tweak and customize embeds.

And above that’s 10th St NW, near the new City Center development. Formerly home to the Washington Convention Center and then a parking lot, it’s the first time this street has been open in decades. I liked the bike lane. It’s an iPhone photo, edited in the Flickr mobile app.

This is Not a Bike Lane

15th St cycletrack under construction
15th St Cycletrack under construction.

Progress in this city is as rutted and uneven as the bike lane pictured above. This is the 15th St Cycletrack. It’s supposed to be a bike lane running along the curb, protected from traffic by white, reflective bollards and a line of parked cars on the left.

The DC Department of Transportation (DDOT) is rebuilding the lane – great! But they tore it up and left it this way, with no detours or accommodations for cyclists. Without white painted lanes or bollards, drivers don’t know it’s a cycletrack. They drive and park in it while cyclists come the opposite way – a recipe for accidents.

DDOT was warned. WABA asked to help during the planning process – and was ignored. And once the construction started, cyclists tweeted at them, including me, after witnessing WABA Bike Ambassador Pete Beers nearly get killed. I asked that orange cones be put up to mark the lane. DDOT assured me that they would fix the problem. But they did nothing.

 

This infuriates me. I work in government. I respond to citizen concerns every day. Civil servants have a duty to fix problems. DDOT under the Fenty administration responded to and fixed problems the same day.

This DDOT project has been poorly planned, reckless and negligent. It would not have happened under Adrian Fenty. But is commonplace under Mayor Gray. Cast your vote accordingly.

Friday Photo: Gentrification Edition

Ted's Bulletin at 14th and Swann
Ted’s Bulletin at 14th and Swann, NW, Washington, DC.

The pace of change in this city is breathtaking. The above photo is a brand-new Ted’s Bulletin, a local chain featuring “adult milkshakes” and reinvented comfort food. It’s part of a slew of new development along 14th Street – condos, bars and coffee shops that offer a virtually uninterrupted hipster paradise in the center of the city.

It’s unbelievable for anyone who remembers what this neighborhood was like in the 90s. I lived at 15th and Swann and avoided 14th St – it was nothing but urban blight. You hurried through the neighborhood lest you be accosted by drug addicts and homeless people. And you certainly didn’t go to the other side of 14th – god knows what was happening over there.

14th and Swann was home to a laundromat. On the same block was a methadone clinic. Across the street was a used-car lot and a second-hand store. The neighborhood was gritty and half-abandoned. It had been that way since the 1968 riots and seemed like it would never change. But it did.

For better? Worse? A lot of my novel Murder in Ocean Hall takes place in this neighborhood and the book reflects my ambivalence about the change. It’s undeniably for the better but I also hate that 14th Street has become a playground for conspicuous consumption, a place to buy skinny jeans, eat crepes and go to brunch.

I liked the grit, and miss it now that it’s gone.

What Jeff Bezos Should Do Now

The winter of the Washington Post’s discontent.

Congratulations, Jeff Bezos, you just bought yourself a newspaper.

Even the most stalwart defenders of The Washington Post would agree that the current business model is untenable. It was high-minded journalism made possible thanks to the generous support of low-brow classifieds. Garage sale ads paid for Woodward and Bernstein.

But Craigslist stole that income stream years ago. Newspapers thought they were better than that. They were wrong.

For a while, the paper made do with support from its test-preparation service and other dubious schemes while it flailed about for a winning strategy.

It never found it. Print subscribers deserted the paper and digital ads never amounted to much. The Post used to be the paper of record, augustly informing the imperial capital what was news and what wasn’t.

Those days are over, and thank god. Instead, readers have the power. We decide what’s important.

Still, a city needs a newspaper, right? Wrong – we need journalism. It doesn’t matter whether it’s paper or electrons, tweeted or printed, we need the old-fashioned work of writers, editors and photographers.

Bezos buying WaPo is an endorsement of that view. He bought journalism, with an eye for reinventing it like he reinvented online shopping and book publishing.

What should he do? As a DC resident, long-time reader of the Post and freelance writer, I’ve got some ideas:

lost and found
How brilliant is this?

1. Create a weekend edition of the Express

Reading the Washington Post Express is a daily routine for tens of thousands of Washington commuters. We get up, pick up a copy of this free paper, and then read it while we’re stuck in the Metro. We’re literally a captive audience, stuck underground, as we endure the latest Metro calamity.

But it’s a Monday-Friday paper and underutilized asset. I suggest creating a weekend edition, targeted to a different audience – tourists and people coming into the city for the weekend. Make it a fun guide to the weekend’s events, something that people can take with them.

And include a map in each issue, to help people navigate Washington’s yuppie delights.

2. Double the pay of Express distributors

Rain or shine, you can find a friendly face handing out copies of the Express every weekday morning at Metro stations. With a stack of papers and a hearty hello, they are Washington Post brand ambassadors – and deserve to be paid accordingly.

Double their pay as a goodwill gesture. Reward the face of your brand. Doing so will address the accusation that Amazon is anti-worker. Also, these brand ambassadors might just solve the last-mile problem. If they can hand out papers, they can hand out other things as well.

3. Fire Ezra Klein

No one embodies the mediocre state of the news like Ezra Klein. A reliable stenographer for Washington’s elite class, he is a journolist who got caught trying to fix news coverage. He and his cohorts sought to deny the rest of us the truth.

Straddling the line between reportage and advocacy, he exists in the chummy East Coast world of liberal groupthink, where Washington insiders pass seamlessly between politics, media and government.

Let him pursue his inevitable destiny, as a lead-in for hoaxer Al Sharpton or as a particularly mendacious Obama press secretary.

4. Hire Glenn Greenwald

With his NSA exposes, Greenwald is a true muckraker who lives up to the crusading ideals that the Washington Post was once known for (where was the paper, BTW?). Greenwald risks Gitmo to get the story. He believes in something and is willing to put his life on the line to cover it – how many DC reporters  would do the same?

He’s prickly, and an asshole, but isn’t that what you want a journalist to be?

5. Kill the paywall… forever

The paywall is twenty years too late. News has escaped its bounds and can now be found everywhere. Why pay for something I can get for free?

And like many of the Post’s digital initiatives, the paywall is a sloppy, second-best effort full of holes and loopholes. Work in government – no paywall for you! There are so many exceptions that I wonder who the fool is who actually pays for the paper online.

Kill it. And swear that it will never return. Like Facebook, promise that the Washington Post will always be free online.

–

The Washington Post has been a part of my whole adult life. I read it in college between classes. Coming home late at night, I used to see the trucks lined up outside the building on 15th St, ready to deliver papers to the Washington region. Seeing my first article published in the paper was a special thrill.

I’m also an Amazon fan and a supporter of the Internet revolution. I’ve self-published two novels with Amazon. I own (and love) a Kindle Paperwhite. I work on web sites for a living.

Jeff Bezos, I wish you luck. With your customer-centric philosophy and history of innovation, you’re just the man to figure out how to make the news survive as a business. Newspapers may no longer be printed on dead trees but journalism must endure.

Sequestered and Feeling Fine

Due to a sequester-related contracting snafu, I get a spring break of an indeterminate length! Hopefully, I will be back to work at the National Weather Service in a week or two.

They call it a “gap” as they move people from one contract to another. I’ve got a job with the new company on a new contract. Who that company is, when the work starts and even how much I’m paid – all that is unknown.

Letting the contractors wander off and then hoping to sign them up with a new company is one of those “only in government” moments. It only makes sense if you work there. But if you think about it logically, and count up all the costs in managing people this way, it will drive you mad.

I was a Communications Manager for the Weather-Ready Nation initiative, which is about making communities more resilient in the face of extreme weather. In this role, I developed communication plans, managed web site content and coordinated social media efforts. We were making good progress too – see this presentation I gave to the Federal Communicators Network for more about my work.

DC is gorgeous this time of year. In addition to enjoying the delights of the city (food trucks, bike trails, museums), I have my own projects to work on:

  • Judging screenplays for the American University Visions contest
  • Blogging
  • And, of course, photography

I’ve got plenty to do.